The terrorist attacks in Paris immediately changed the course of the presidential race as national security and foreign policy rose to the top of stump speeches and television interviews.

Now, the campaigns and outside groups are starting to feel comfortable running political advertisements about the attacks, darkening the holiday-season tone of commercial breaks in early voting states with messages tinged with fear and images of terrorist camps and Islamic State recruits.

It is a delicate line, one that the campaigns are aware of as they navigate politicizing a tragedy. But in a Republican race dominated by two outsider candidates, Donald J. Trump and Ben Carson, a tragedy like the attacks in Paris is giving candidates who have experience in public office an opening to highlight their national security credentials.

“This is the moment the institutional guys have been waiting for to have some impact on the field,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political strategist. “Talking about the threat and how it must be confronted — it’s all from the frame of ‘I look like a president.’ ”

The first ad released by Senator Marco Rubio’s campaign featured the senator in stark attire: a black suit, flag lapel, bold red tie, set against a black background with a backlit shadow obscuring part of his face.

“What happened in Paris could happen here,” Mr. Rubio said directly into the camera, creating an aura of a presidential address rather than a scattershot hodgepodge of campaign trail footage.

The ad refrained from showing any imagery of terrorists or the aftermath of the attacks in Paris.

The first ad that Right to Rise USA, the “super PAC” supporting Jeb Bush, released after the attacks featured an amped-up candidate speaking at the Citadel military college in South Carolina, declaring, “We are at war with radical Islamic terrorism.” The ad occasionally cut from footage of the speech to images of terrorists with rocket launchers in the back of pickup trucks. The group is running a digital display campaign and sending out mailings highlighting Mr. Bush’s national security record.

“You want to have footage that matches what viewers are seeing in the news, or TV news, but you don’t want to go too far,” Larry McCarthy, a media consultant for Right to Rise, said about using footage of terrorists and camps.

The campaign of Gov. John Kasich of Ohio mirrored that approach, using a speech he gave the day after the Paris attacks and overlaying it with news footage of terrorist camps and Toyota pickup trucks with heavy artillery guns in the flatbed. The ad was titled “For Strength. For Us.”

The impact of the Paris attacks was almost immediately recognized on the campaign trail. Many saw the speech Mr. Bush gave that formed the backbone of the super PAC ad as a potential turning point in his lagging campaign because it showed a more energized and impassioned candidate. And Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who had been struggling to break through with New Hampshire voters, has seen a major reversal in both his polling numbers there and the reception he gets from voters.

So the super PAC supporting Mr. Christie’s candidacy, America Leads, released an ad highlighting the speech in which Mr. Christie announced his candidacy, saying, “This president and Hillary Clinton made America weaker and more vulnerable.” The ad spliced that footage with grayscale images of Islamic State training camps and the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

The groups are starting to put big money behind the ads. Right to Rise has rotated its post-attack ad into its existing $6.6 million national advertising campaign on Fox News and additional buys in the early voting states. America Leads recently spent $500,000 in New Hampshire broadcast markets to promote Mr. Christie. And the super PAC supporting Senator Lindsey Graham’s bid, Security Is Strength, just spent more than $1 million in advertising on cable channels across New Hampshire.

But it is not just the experienced politicians who are advertising to project strength in the face of terrorism. Carly for America, the super PAC supporting Carly Fiorina’s candidacy, produced an online-only ad running more than two minutes that features hazy clips of terrorists shooting machine guns from the back of a pickup truck.

And some ads are more blunt. Mr. Trump, who reserves his more caustic comments about Muslims for his stump speeches, released as part of a group of four radio ads last week a ranting promise, in a loud and aggressive timbre common to his rallies, that he would “quickly and decisively bomb the hell out of ISIS.”

What remains to be seen is whether any of the advertisements will help the institutional candidates overtake Mr. Trump. Even though he has never confronted a terrorist threat in his tenure as a billionaire businessman and reality television star, New Hampshire voters in a Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll said it was Mr. Trump, not Mr. Bush or Mr. Rubio, whom they trusted most to combat terrorism.

“More voters are looking for judgment and approach than an immediate reflection of a shared anger,” said Stuart Stevens, a Republican political operative who was a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012. “And you see something like Paris, everyone feels angry.”

But Mr. Stevens said that the most successful candidates would be those who used their ads to move beyond simply echoing that anger, and who offered a vision for combating terrorism that helped them pass the “threshold test” of being commander in chief. He cited Mr. Christie, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush as three who had done well in that regard.